Tobacco Lawsuits Open in La., Ill.

ALAN SAYRE

Published 7:00 pm, Monday, January 20, 2003

Associated Press Writer

A lawsuit to force Big Tobacco to pay for kick-the-habit programs for 1.5 million Louisiana smokers opened Tuesday with the plaintiffs accusing cigarette makers of conspiring for decades to get customers hooked.

Tobacco companies "made a choice to get together and conspire. They made a choice to addict. They made a choice to target youth," said Russ Herman, the plaintiffs' lead attorney.

The lawsuit seeks no individual payments for smokers. Instead, it wants the industry to pay for stop-smoking programs and medical monitoring for still-healthy smokers.

Also Tuesday, a trial began in Illinois, where lawyers for 1 million smokers have accused Philip Morris of consumer fraud for marketing "light" cigarettes as being less harmful.

The Louisiana plaintiffs say cigarette makers conspired to manipulate the nicotine levels in their products, a contention long denied by the industry.

Herman said he would show that the heads of major tobacco companies had a "gentleman's agreement" to hide the dangers of smoking from the public and refused to remove nicotine from cigarettes because they feared financial collapse.

The industry also considered young people "a crop to be harvested" and targeted them with advertising campaigns, Herman said.

Phillip Morris attorney Ronald Shoales argued in his opening statement that the risks of smoking have been widely known for decades, cigarette packages have carried warnings since 1966, and cigarette ads on radio and TV were banned in 1971.

"But today, adults still choose to smoke," he said.

Shoales also said that since the mid-1950s, about 50 million Americans have quit, some through free kick-the-habit clinics and programs.

Phil Wittmann, an attorney for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings, said the medical monitoring that the plaintiffs want can result in false readings that lead to unnecessary and even dangerous procedures.

There has been no estimate of what a loss would cost the industry. However, a smaller class-action suit in West Virginia that sought only medical monitoring carried a potential price tag of hundreds of millions of dollars. The tobacco industry won that case.

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The first phase of the Louisiana trial is expected to take six months to a year. If the industry is found liable, other phases will be held to determine such issues as the responsibility of individual smokers and to set damage payments.